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Yahya In earlier sections, Yahya described his gradual, painful disillusion with the shape of the revolution. He is currently working in the United States. Here he addresses questions about gender roles in his marriage, about negotiating his own identity and those of his children, and about reconciling himself to an imagined Iran with which he can live while working in America. Intellectually it’s hard for me to identify myself. I still am wrestling with whether or not to go back. Once I supported and fought for the revolution. To be an Iranian now means a different thing. Now I tend to associate myself with the Iran before Islam, with the civilization that we once had before Islam. When I think of being an Iranian, I try to think of the Iran that has its roots in a pre-Islamic civilization. That’s what I’m trying to teach my eldest son, trying to teach him about what Iran was, what the culture was before Islam. I don’t know. Being in this country has changed me. I think I have exiled myself. I left with the full intention of returning. Now I can’t. The biggest question for me is what can I do? What can my children do when I go back? What can I do with literature? What could I teach? Any book might be subject to censorship, might create problems. Everything is changing so fast that I can’t predict anything. For instance, you are not allowed to teach Ahmad Shamlu. Imagine that. A student in Iran gets a B.A. or M.A. in Persian literature and he has not read Shamlu or Forough Farokhzad, whose name is never mentioned, or Sadeq Hedayat or Gholam Hosein Saedi, Ibrahim Golestan, or Beizaii. None of these can be taught. You can’t teach Naguib Mahfouz either. My wife has a different approach to the issue. For me the problem is an intellectual problem. For her, she is concerned with her family. She feels that she has no one here, no personal relationships. The intellectual abstractions that concern me don’t concern her. But she is concerned about the education that our three sons will have in Iran. With sons, we immediately think of military service and war. So that is a concern for both of us. yahya 225 She has an M.S. in engineering. She has an idea that as the man in the family, I should have the job. I have encouraged her to go and find a job, told her that I would stay home and take care of the kids, but she worries about what the family at home would say if I stayed home and she went to work. So we have to work at all those new ways of thinking to live in this country. ...

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